Talk about a disparity between title and visual! It would be difficult to come up with an image that less embodied the concept of SCARY TALES that this one, featuring a happy super hero whose body fragments into pieces comically battling a pair of thugs amidst a bright green forest. And that's because, like the … Continue reading Brand Echh: Scary Tales #38
Now this one is a bit of a strange aberration, one that I wasn't even aware of when it first saw print. SCARY TALES had been released intermittently by publisher Charlton filled with weird mystery stories of the sort that DC and other publishers were issuing--that is to say, stories that had twist endings or … Continue reading Brand Echh: Scary Tales #40
Time once again to check in on the exploits of the greatest of the mid-1960s Mighty Comics super heroes, the hen-pecked Web. As you'll recall from previous installments, Mighty Comics was Archie's attempt to get into teh super hero game at the height of Batmania by reviving all of their long underwear characters from the … Continue reading Brand Echh: Mighty Comics #46
Thunderbunny was one of the more successful characters to come out of the world of amateur fan publishing. He was the creation of Martin L. Greim, who was a fan who published a well-regarded fanzine, THE COMIC CRUSADER, for several years beginning in the late 1960s. His final fan publication was a black and white … Continue reading Brand Echh: Charlton Bullseye #6
As the Direct Sales comic book market opened up as a viable alternative to mainstream distribution at the start of the 1980s, all sorts of different publishers leapt into the fray with their own offerings, hoping to strike it big. More than a few of these were initially offered as black and white magazines along … Continue reading Brand Echh: Galaxia #1
The opening up of the Direct Sales marketplace, comprised of a string of independently-operated comic book specialty shops across the Nation and eventually the globe--offered up new promise in terms of the way in which comic books were sold. Up to this point, Comics were sold like any other periodical publication: a print run was … Continue reading Brand Echh: JCP Features the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1
Archie Comics' attempt to get back into the super hero marketplace in 1983 under their Red Circle imprint was, by all accounts, a bit of a mess. It was an experiment that played itself out over around two years, and which produced some interesting experiments as well as a bunch of just out-and-out junk. The … Continue reading Brand Echh: The Comet #1
As we've spoken about in the past, Charlton Comics never really had a motivated interest in getting into the super hero field. They were quite happy most of the time to produce their line of largely-interchangeable war, romance, mystery, hot rod and western comics. But every once in a while, somebody at the organization would … Continue reading Brand Echh: Son of Vulcan #50
It's time once again for another dive into MIGHTY COMICS, Archie's attempt to reverse-engineer the appeal of the Marvel books of the era without understanding them a whit. As before, we're going to be focusing on my favorite of the Mighty creations, the Web. The Web wasn't cast as a Spider-Man knock-off as you might … Continue reading Brand Echh: Mighty Comics #45
Charlton was pretty much the bottom rung of the comic book business. Yes, they published a lot of material, but it was always on the crappiest paper, and always had the worst distribution. What's more, it only rarely seemed as though anybody cared about what the content of these magazines was. One notable exception was … Continue reading Brand Echh: Thunderbolt #54
The Tom Brevoort Experience 